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The Argentinean Lesson (Wojciech Staron | Poland | 56 min.)

With lush and intimate photography, Wojciech Staron documents his family’s move from Poland to Argentina. Struggling to adapt in a foreign country, his 8-year-old son Janek finds a friend in Marcia, a grounded 11-year-old Argentinean of Polish descent. With a strength and determination well beyond her years, Marcia must help make ends meet while holding her family together. A coming-of-age story uniquely cross-cultural and universal, Janek and Marica go on adventures throughout the Argentinian countryside together finding work and exploring the beauty of nature around them. Janek’s eagerness and Marcia’s tenacity make them two unforgettable characters in an unconventional love story that sees the innocence of childhood surrounded by the harsh realities of adulthood.

The use of 16mm film lends The Argentinean Lesson an eternal feel, fitting with the intricate and timelessness of the aging cars and machinery of the exotic locale. As a follow up to his 1998 film Siberian Lesson where he followed his now wife as she taught Polish to immigrants in Siberia, Argentinean Lesson has won numerous awards at the Krakow Film Festival in Poland and has screened at the True/False Film Festival in Missouri.

Argentinean Lesson is part of a new era of the docudrama, blending the honesty a documentary provides and the rich texture a fiction film gives through its “vivid, dynamic, emotional and strong” visuals. (Vox Magazine) Offering a reflection on our own childhood and a focus on nature, there’s no better place for viewing The Argentinean Lesson than outdoors.

Rooftop Films is a New York based non-profit whose mission is to engage diverse communities by showing independent movies in outdoor locations, producing new films, coordinating youth media education, and renting equipment at low cost to artists.